A group of well-meaning national and international bureaucracies dispensed foreign aid under conditions in which bureaucracy does not work well. The environment that created aid bureaucracies led those organizations to (a)define their output as money disbursed rather than service delivered,...

Do superpower interventions to install and prop up political leaders in other countries subsequently result in more or less democracy, and does this effect vary depending on whether the intervening superpower is democratic or authoritarian? While democracy may be expected to decline...

Previous literature suggests that leaders matter for growth in general. This paper asks which leaders matter and develops a methodology to estimate the growth contribution of individual leaders and calculate its precision. The findings show that few leaders have statistically significant...

The authors systematically document remarkably high degrees of concentration in manufacturing exports for a sample of 151 countries over a range of 3,000 products. For every country manufacturing exports are dominated by a few "big hits" which account for most of the export value and where the...

While many analysts decry the lack of sufficient investment in Africa, we find no evidence that private and public investment are productive, either in Africa as a whole (unless Botswana is included in the sample), or in the manufacturing sector in Tanzania. In this restricted sense, inadequate...

We find evidence for the crisis-induces-reform hypothesis at extreme values of the inflation rate and the black market premium. Episodes of extremely high inflation or black market premiums are followed by periods of better performance than episodes of moderately high inflation or black market...

We present evidence that measures of quot;social cohesion,quot; such as income inequality and ethnic fractionalization, endogenously determine institutional quality, which in turn casually determines growth

We study the instability of hyper-specialization of exports. We have two main findings. (1) Specializations are surprisingly unstable: Export ranks are not persistent, and new top products and destinations replace old ones. Measurement error is unlikely to be the main or only determinant of this...